Catalogue > At random

SYNOPSIS COURT : At night, during the Persian new year celebrations in Spring, the inhabitants of Los Angeles become the hosts to memories of Tehran. They no longer speak English, but a Persian idiom. Neon lights fill the streets with psychedelic colors. During this interval, like the old roman technics of the memory palace which used space visualisation to memorize information, the material space of the ephemeral and mutant territory of Los Angeles streets are used to host the memory of Tehran one last time before disappearing. SYNOPSIS LONG : At night, during the Persian new year celebrations in Spring, the inhabitants of Los Angeles become the hosts to memories of Tehran. They no longer speak English, but a Persian idiom. Neon lights fill the streets with psychedelic colors. During this interval, like the old roman technics of the memory palace which used space visualisation to memorize information, the material space of the ephemeral and mutant territory of Los Angeles streets are used to host the memory of Tehran one last time before disappearing. To write this film Arash Nassiri interviewed a group of Iranians around Europe and North America that used to live in Tehran in the seventies. At this period, the Iranian city was heavily influenced by western culture. Architects from California and Los Angeles where commissioned to build the urban planning of Tehran. The sociologist used to describe this phenomenon as Tehran-Los Angeles. This fantasy of western modernity ended abruptly at the revolution, thus never fully realized and now living only in the memory of people who lived in Tehran during this era. 

Arash Nassiri is a young Franco-Iranian artist born in Teheran in 1986. He lives and works in Paris. After a time at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, an exchange in Berlin to study the relationship between art and technology, and a career at Arts-Décoratifs in Paris to study photography and video, he finished his studies at the prestigious Fresnoy in Tourcoing. Arash Nassiri uses places as the frameworks to produce his work in, as in Land Art. These places can be very specific, like a ruined building, or a whole city, as in the video Tehran-geles where Los Angeles is used as the representation of Tehran. The work produces a discussion between two opposite poles: the materiality and the virtuality of the place «I like to imagine my projects as Embassies. They are representations of speculative spaces, where our ideologies can become visible and malleable». His films have been shown in many exhibitions and festivals in France and abroad such as the Triennale of Istanbul (2010), the Venice Architecture Biennial, the Biennale de Lyon as part of the Palais de Tokyo group exhibition Le Parfait Flâneur (2015), Fundacio Sunnol, Barcelona (2016), the Shanghai Himalaya Museum (2016) and the Berlinale (2018). Arash Nassiri is the winner of the Press Award, Les Enfants Terribles, Huy, Belgium (2014); the Best Experimental Short Film Award, festival Côté-Court Pantin, Paris (2014); and the RMIT University Award for Best Experimental Short Film, Melbourne Int. Film Festival, Australia (2015).